The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew weighed in on the Gaza conflict as well as the IDF's macho posturing, then tore into Romney's "47 percent" redux, asserted the electoral power of gay voters, reminded us of McCain's doucheyness, and considered how a shirtless Fed might prove therapeutic for scandal-happy conservatives.

In political coverage, Adam Serwer and others got to the bottom of GOP gerrymandering, Bil Browning applauded the diversity of last week's winners, and Chait thought through the next 25 years of America's demography. Erica Grieder made it clear Texas won't become the Going-It-Alone-Star-State, Lee Drutman raised the cost of entry for future politicians, and Ramesh Ponnuru and Josh Barro analyzed the GOP's middle-class fantasies. Also, Rebecca Rosen helped us refute our whacky uncle's email forwards, Twitter users listed their #ObamaGifts, the Onion tried to out-crazy the right-wing tin-hat crowd, and we learned that, no, the auto bailout did not win Obama the election.

Looking internationally, our coverage of the violence in Israel continued as some anticipated a full ground war, while Michael Koplow and Eric Trager examined the responses from Turkey and Egypt, and Yousef Munayyer highlighted the disproportionate death toll in Gaza. Also in the Middle East, Nicholas Seeley doubted Jordan would get its own Arab Spring, while in the Far East, China went with conservatives for its new politburo.

In other assorted coverage, a number of readers contributed their thoughts on America's over-medaled service members, while other readers worked through the idea that public transit wastes resources. Energy was also Jeffrey Leonary's concern as he warned us about our fragile power infrastructure, while Dylan Matthrews tried to recalculate the real number of poor Americans, and Betsy Woodruff tried to get conservatives behind the small government potential of new legal weed laws – laws which might also be coming to the five additional states we took a look at. We went over the depressing statistics regarding women who are denied abortions, checked in on prison reform efforts, and were the view from an angry bird's window. Kevin Kelly concluded that high-tech Bond villains would definitely need henchmen, Lydia Kiesling celebrated the big C criticism of James Wood, Alex Tabarrok used his TED Talk stats to back up online learning, and 'Big Beard' Andrew declined to break bad over legal hard drugs. Lastly, eggs had it coming in our slo-mo MHB, it was a calm Vancouver dawn in our VFYW, and our FOTD enjoyed some fake snow.